Recent Developments in the Drone Sector

When we reported last year that Ukraine aimed to produce one million drones domestically in 2024, such a target appeared very ambitious. However, according to President Zelensky, the number actually produced was 2.2 million.¹ For 2025, the domestic production of 4.5 million has been announced and it does not seem unrealistic to expect that these numbers will be exceeded once again.² It can therefore be assumed that the idea of the drone as an important mass instrument will continue to gain ground in military circles. The drone’s significance on the battlefield is now even influencing German procurement, a notorious laggard in the field of drone armament. In early April, the German Ministry of Defense announced the procurement of an unknown quantity of “loitering ammunition,” initially in small quantities for test purposes, followed by a larger quantity at the end of the year.³ Also announced was the procurement of three additional Heron TP combat drones, bringing the total to eight. In light of these and other developments, it is clear that for years to come drones will play the new central role on battlefields worldwide.

Once again, Ukraine is the current testbed for new kinds of drone operations, such as swarm attacks. In the context of drone technology, swarming refers to autonomous coordination between multiple – and often many – drones. For example, on June 1, approximately 150 drones successfully attacked Russia’s strategic bomber fleet thousands of kilometers inside Russia, in an operation called “Spiderweb” by Ukrainian authorities. Drones were brought into the vicinity of the bases in civilian delivery vehicles driven by unknowing Russian drivers. And less than three weeks later, in operation “Rising Lion,” the recent Israeli attack on Iran, an unknown yet significant number of drones had been smuggled into Iran months prior to the attack, taking out communication nodes or air-defense assets, and causing confusion about the whereabouts of the fighters of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). These operations seem to foreshadow the next level of drone warfare: highly coordinated swarming attacks. In the civilian sphere, drone swarms can now involve the coordinated and choreographed use of over 10,000 drones. An attack of this complexity and scale is significant because until recently the military use of drones swarms has been rather restrained. It is still unclear whether and to what extent the approximately 150 drones which attacked Russian assets were actually coordinating themselves as a swarm or were predominantly controlled individually. However, the fact that the simultaneous attack had such a significant impact will fuel further developments in military swarming and the development of AI solutions significantly.

Another very interesting aspect of the “Spiderweb” attack is that, according to available sources, at least some of the drones were remotely piloted by human operators – which would either imply that there was a time lag involved or that the operators were relatively close to the facility with limited chances of escape – while others relied on AI to identify relevant planes worth attacking. According to the definition of the Pentagon’s Directive 3000.09, this such a swarm would qualify as an autonomous weapon. While autonomous targeting is nothing new, thanks to AI it will continue to find its way into more and more systems in the future. Even Germany expects loitering munitions to make use of AI for target acquisition, though at this stage only understood as supporting human operators.⁴

Another development takes these ideas one step further. As reported last year, both the USA and China have developed AI pilots for conventional fighter jets, making possible the option of removing humans as the weakest link in the fighter aircraft system. This development is no longer limited to the two leading AI nations, the USA and China. In the meantime, in 2025, the German AI and drone provider Helsing, together with the defense arm of Saab, have developed an AI agent, ‘Centaur,’ which could not only guide a real aircraft but also lead it in a simulated ‘Beyond Visual Range’ (BVR) air combat.⁵ According to Helsing, the companies “achieved this major milestone in less than six months from conception to live flights.” It would be naive to assume that such experiments and developments are not already underway in other countries. This raises the possibility that other countries will use similar technologies to significantly increase the combat power of their aging fleets without the costs of new procurement, thereby upsetting regional balances.

Given all these developments, it is obvious that countering drone warfare, as well as countering counter-drone warfare, has become a cat-and-mouse game not only in science labs but on the actual battlefield. In Ukraine, large areas of land are covered with extremely long filaments that might be plausibly mistaken for immense spider threads. Yet far from being natural fibers, these filaments are the remnants of so called “fly-by-wire” drones. As part of the race to avoid electronic jamming and interference, more and more drones are steered via extremely thin fiber-optic cables, usually with a length between 9 and 20 kilometers, thereby copying (at least to some extent) similar developments in the realm of torpedoes.⁶

It is obvious that many drone defense systems, which do rely on electronic warfare, are useless against systems utilizing fly-by-wire drones or similar autonomous counterparts. The next version of the German main battle tank, the Leopard A8 will receive an active defense system called “Trophy”, protecting the tank from rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) as well as drones.⁷ Another example is the tender issued by the German Armed Forces Procurement Office for a new on-board cannon for the German Navy’s ships. An important feature of this new 30mm cannon is its integration into the existing fire control systems as well as the ability to fire so-called air-burst ammunition for drone defense.⁸ This also applies to the Skyranger, the Bundeswehr’s new system for tactical air defense.

In sum: Drone warfare is rapidly evolving, driven by AI, mass production, and new tactics like swarming and fiber-optic guidance. Such developments pose significant challenges to traditional defenses. Given these dynamics and given the state of international arms control, heavy investment in creative counter drone technology and the fostering of international cooperation on drone defense R&D is clearly the order of the day.